The current schedule is to update this every Tuesday with what I’m currently working on, where I am, and possibly a story about a thing that happened.

The above is from a collaboration I did with Loren Erdritch at VSC; she put down the color and I riffed on it. I did two others with her that came alright, and I gave her two color plates that she’s going to do the ink for. Similarly I did two pieces with Leah Wolff, and there are maybe two or three more pending. In all of them I put down one color layer and then she did the second. The two done ones are here:

I mentioned the hanging diamonds thing last month, made from scraps from my work exchange job in the office upstairs; in a similar vein was my drawing game Alpha Symbolia, which I did on thick paper plates that were the cropped edges of the invitations the development office printed out to send to the center’s donors for the big Tibetan flags art show last month. The principle was to see how far I could get without spending more than a few seconds on a given small drawing, with “no repeats or hesitations,” and with the entire body meant to appear as a single unit. That’s below.

I’m doing a table at the 215 Festival on the 25th where I’ll have like every zine I’ve ever made, hopefully the Darcone Triangle books that Mark Price is printing for us, a new Philly junk/joke book, and an old school “doing it the hard way”-style painting/ink book in a mega small edition where I am just going to make five or ten completely original copies and that’s going to be it.

While I’m in town I’m going to Don Simon’s thing at City Hall and me and Jenn Rockwell will be drawing. Me and my Men’s Group will be up to our typical no-good/not-much. I feel like I should reiterate that anyone who wants to collaborate should get started on something and then get it to me with directions.

Alpha Symbolia

The dust blows forward and the dust blows back

I may have mentioned last time that I finished Cocomo Tales, or at least a working draft of it that I think is good enough to print out and read to everyone, and possibly good enough after one more round of revision to send out after that.

I’ve taken the last two days off from doing writing work and have mainly been painting and drawing. I listen to the Kites record. I started reading other people’s tarot cards. I sent Susy a letter. Leah and I stayed up until 5am doing work, and I freaked out and decided to try to cover the floor of Wolf Kahn in paper diamonds. Open studios happened and David’s art turned out to be awesome. Ricky left a note on my desk that reads “What’s a life when you look at it – what’s a hat if it doesn’t fit? – Robert Creely”. James and I had the fucking ridiculous/hilarious Cynthia incident and our brains exploded. We all went swimming in the hole yesterday. I laughed about the Dugdo thing for a while. I think I mentioned it already but I went to Rosemarie Fiore‘s lecture and her shit was the bomb; note especially the Looney Tunes jams and the floor waxer painting. I worked on my website a lot yesterday and am going to relaunch it with an indexhibit back-end probably this week so I can stop worrying about managing files and just post them.

I’m going to drink coffee and have brunch and then paint until my friends wake up. Then we’re going to the diner together. The weather is horrible. Life is exploding with immaculate potential. It is making my teeth taste like tequila. Everyone here, just like at camp, is trying to get me to move to New York.

On tour once we were laying in a long sloping green grass field, freshly cut, full of huge moist chunks of clippings, like slabs of delicious green cake. I was allergic to them and sneezed.

On the bridge walking over from Maverick to my Wolf Kahn space, around eight thirty last night, I became aware that my shoes were wet. I was carrying my sleeping bag and pillow, moving to my new hole. I wondered how it can be that this is now my life, and how everything I’ve worked on for the past four years can all have suddenly become like a distant piece of weather. This thought in a good way, of course – I am writing now at 9am in my studio, after eating a legit breakfast, after making crap until 2am – but in a shocking way too. I spent much of yesterday wondering what else in my life can be remade as I like – my mobile sleep space, my work space, my schedule, my work itself, abandoned buildings, trains, roads – and all I could think of that remains without my explicit decision to hold onto it is my name.

Guiding handgame wisdom for all journeying motherfuckers with planless anarchy lives and shoes that are taking on water =
Concentration (clap clap clap)
Sixty Four (clap clap clap)
No Repeats (clap clap clap)
or Hesitations (clap clap clap)

I slept in Kahn last night with my head by the window. I woke up in a dream just before dawn and got halfway out of bed to start drawing before I realized what time it was. A ripping thunderstorm woke me just after dawn. I dreamed that Leah’s door was covered in strange notes, and that James came into my studio to hang out, and we hung out for a while, and then he left. I watched “The Valet” with him last night. It was pretty funny.

I don’t have much new to report since I’ve mostly been working, except that it looks like I’m going to send probably my Cocomo project and accompanying drawings(?) to <a href=”http://www.annawolf.com”>Anna Wolf</a> for this <a href=”http://www.untitled-a-magazine.com/”>magazine</a> she works on, for January 09 print, and that’s exciting. J Roc and I are also going to do a split art book, out December, but I don’t know any details of that. I’m doing a 40 panel drawing project re: my favorite Velvet Underground song “Some Kinda Love” that I’m sort of terrified to start because I’ll have to finish it, but it’s sketched out and ready to go, and now that I have an art studio instead of a writing studio (though I’m still here as a writer, and spending my majority of time writing), it might happen.

Crafting a friday from the raw material of a day = gangbuster nuit zonk times. Dear Philadelphia, where are the juice trains now that I finally need them.

I spent all morning yesterday trying to figure out how to write. I got to work through the entirety of my failed city technique, and I now feel like I’ve emerged on the other side of it as a person who is capable of doing what, as they say in Pittsburgh, needs done. There’s a rap that goes “Don’t go against the grain, the grain!” that I keep not heeding in my work process. Like I keep trying to paint with a marker, when clearly all you can do with a marker is go and write on a train. Similarly I keep trying to convince myself that painting and writing on a train are different things, and that one is more valuable than the other, when in fact they are the same thing, and are equally worthless/equally, endlessly worth pursuing and unfolding like perfect fucking brain salad origami. So in writing, I have this marker in my brain, and I keep trying to use it to make a lame painting, when I need to use it to write enormous fucked up things on a train. I’ve always had this awareness in a vague way but in the last few days I feel like a root missing honesty is emerging in my stupid craft, or something, and I am stoked about it. Don’t go against the grain, the grain.

SO anyway yesterday I only wrote like two paragraphs, second shitty day in a row re: material productivity, but I think the slowing down is indicative of, I don’t know, an impending crew change?

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Green River reservoir with Lauren, Laurie and Devon, and it was 100% killer. I got green and swam further than I’ve ever swam before out to a distant island. Water was freezing and the wind slapped waves against me as I swam back. When we returned to the shore, Devon had brought champagne. I melted and panicked about the prospect of whether or not the day would ever be beatable by any other. When we got back we had seafood putanesca  with fresh cheese and bread for dinner, mixed berry pie for desert.

Friday style here was raucous but with a weird, semi-uneasy tone, that maybe I just felt, or maybe was actually there. Many bottles of wine and three cases of beer were transferred into about thirty peoples’ bodies, from 9pm through until about 3am. I convinced James, Cara and Georgia to go to the abandoned building by the covered bridge; when we got there, James and I crawled around inside for a while, and then we came back out. I’m going to take daytime pictures of the boring rubble and garbage inside later this week. On the way back to the fire, 2:30am, the team stopped to go swimming in the stream while I sat on the rocks and possibly napped. Back at the fire, Tenzing was naked, having burned his clothes, and he tried to tell me the drunken secrets of being. Georgia and I rang the gongs in the meditation room for about forty five minutes and then I went to sleep in my studio, somehow convinced that there was no way I could get back home. I used the fake mexican rug from Jed’s shed as my blanket, and my hoodie as my pillow. The carpets are hard and rough but I slept excellently.
I had a great interaction with this old townie Phil today, and I sipped his Hurricane because he kind of called me out on not drinking a beer with him (1:30pm), and I did a lot of writing this morning. I might go to Burlington later for art week or whatever, their local art festival, and then to The Long Trail, which as far as I can tell is the Johnson, VT Doobie’s.

Okay, I am going back to normal work.

PS: Seriously if you are reading this you should try to get someone to buy the painting I posted yesterday, because I am also facing a mounting hilarity re: where my checks are going to come from when I finish this action, and I would like to continue to be able to drink wine, beer and whiskey, and put gas in my car.

A view from breaking into a building to look at garbage

Sparkle rager

A view from breaking into a building to look at garbage

I’m in residency at Vermont Studio Center right now, where I’m going to try to complete a work I started in March, so that I might have a novel to sell as merch on our next band tour, per the joke I have with Mike about that. It is currently my intention to use this blog as a self-awareness check while I’m here, until the end of September.

I just got back from camp. My beautiful soul brother Travis Iurato and I made “Darcone Triangle” and “Forty Useless Prehistoric Computers,” books that are respectively CX #3 and CX #4, CX now being in my brain what my work with Travis is, though we haven’t discussed it. We intend to print Darcone in book format and I expect I’ll be posting Useless Computers here later this week. I also got CX Styles back from him and it has progressed incredibly. David Mahfouda and I wrote letters to each other, Jessica Findley and I made this one morning,

Click here to view the embedded video.

I helped her with this,

Click here to view the embedded video.

And my kids made this.

Click here to view the embedded video.

More video (including Allen’s tableaux vivant and yeti video) at youtube.com/beamcamp. My kids also screenprinted wallpaper, made fake bands and did exquisite sharpie tshirts.

Christi Byrd and I stayed in Brattleboro at Tinderbox and at Hawthorne Valley Farm on the way back down to the city. In Philadelphia I godstormed and watched the trains. Davey bought me a falafel, Ben and I ate crappy cheeseburgers, I bought Mike samosas and myself a tofu hoagie and some oranges, I talked to Blaine but didn’t get to see her, I drank a beer with Kendra and Shanta and high fived Laris, road bikes with Ellen. Amber and Mike hosted; Allen was present for much of it. Jen Rockwell and Bonsky and I hugged. Tony invited me to stay with him in Texas during my travels.

At home before I came here my grampa told me a funny story about a professor he once fired; “Fuckin guy,” he said, “He kept saying he believed in ‘freedom of the mind.’ ‘Freedom of the mind.’” Not much else happened. I slept in the dining room.

This morning at 8am I bought shaving cream, soap, shavers, shampoo and a bottle of wine from the grocery store. Cocomo was playing.

My street (7am)

My house

My street

To be sure, there is not and cannot be a single fast wonder in the year of our wonder and sorrow 2008. I took most of last week off from the Internet and spent it in Boston. I’ve been working on my video “Strobe” and spending time in my office at 5th and Girard. Look for my longer update soon.

Click here to view the embedded video.

cover dudes

DB

Lindsay Daen 

10 yr old Joe W’s skate dude. 

TI 

TI page from Apple and Banana

Current events 

I finished my loft last week. My room mural is ongoing. I am working on a drawing zine with Travis, who was kind and visionary enough to start it and send it to my court. I cooked delicious vegetables tonight and Jamie came and visited. I spent a weekend in Ohio. I have Netflix now and have seen a lot of dumb movies and two good ones. I started working on suspended shelves for my stereo speakers and next week I’m building normal shelves for my collapsing piles of floor junk and records. This weekend is The Cabin and I’ll be out of town for a few days for that. The following is Beam Halloween stuff. Real true stories coming soon.